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How much more suspicious activity and lucky coincidences would there need to be to convince you (if you're a current denier) that Epstein was murdered/"allowed" to kill himself?
Because from what I see there's a lot of weird things already. The cameras for in front of his cell are down, guards apparently failed to check in on him (apparently both of them fell asleep despite this being their job), his roommate he's supposed to have for suicide watch is moved out earlier that day without replacement, and two staff members get accused of falsifying records only for the charges to get dropped silently two years after over new years.
Now the one camera that was working has footage released from it only for it to be likely edited video that doesn't even provide a meaningful perspective even if it wasn't edited (so why is it changed and had parts removed? Was something incidentally caught on one of the cameras they didn't shut down?) and a full minute missing along with the other smaller possible cuts, a cut that was completely unmentioned in the inspector general's report but suddenly shows up now. With an excuse that the "missing minute" is a standard reset and the recordings aren't operating at that time yet it now appears to exist according to government leakers.
That same day Epstein was also allowed to make an unmonitored call on a line intended for attorneys only to a non-attorney, with the regional director saying "We don't know what happened on that phone. It could have potentially lead to the incident, but we don't - we will never know" which is another oddity. He claimed he was calling his mother ... his mother has been dead almost two decades before then.
Then afterwards, Epstein's own lawyers contested the official finding and hired their own pathologist who said the injuries were more indicative of homicide by strangulation than normal self hanging.
Then of course we have things like Epstein's sweetheart deal maker Alex Acosta being a literal high level member of the government stepping down only a month before the suicide. Was he distancing himself? Cause that's a mighty odd coincidence too to leave right around that time.
And we get told all sorts of things about having files ready for release, only for them to apparently not actually exist like all the files sitting on Pam Bondi's desk. We have leaks of multiple high level politicians (including the current president refusing to release the records who also resigned over the federal government when Epstein died and hired Acosta earlier) with close connections to him. We have intelligence operatives and high level officials trying hard both directly and indirectly as anonymous sources to deny accusations he was working for them which many powerful people are trying to tout as evidence. Which fair, I expect them to deny if it's not true. But also I expect them to lie if it is true.
Like oh really spy agencies, half your job is to be skilled liars and we're just supposed to take your word for it. People can't be this lacking in self-awareness right? So why do so many of the powerful people with connections to Epstein apparently lack this understanding and think it's compelling counter evidence by itself?
Like obviously none of these things in their own are proof by themselves. If they were, we wouldn't be having a discussion like this we would just say "look at the 100% proof it happened". But a lot of truthful things don't have 100% proof. I'm pretty sure OJ Simpson is a murderer despite not having seen it myself and him being found not guilty. I'm pretty sure Casey Anthony killed her daughter. There's a really strong likelihood Micheal Jackson molested some children. Carole Baskin (although a bit weaker of a suspicion) might have been involved in the disappearance of her husband. None of these have hard conclusive evidence, yet none of these are odd to believe.
And just like those examples, there's a whole lot of weird oddities and coincidences and suspicious behavior around Epstein, his death, and the information on him and his connections that it seems pretty reasonable to suspect his supposed suicide wasn't entirely legit. Outside of 100% proof, how much more would be needed before it stops being "just a conspiracy theory"?
I wonder if I can take this as an opportunity to just start from the top?
I have very little prior investment in Epstein. I had never heard of him before he became famous on the internet - for years literally the only thing I knew about Epstein was that he's the guy who didn't kill himself. "Epstein didn't kill himself" was a meme I saw in a range of places but I didn't know what it meant or its significance. Eventually I did get curious and looked it up, and what I got was basically that Epstein was a rich asshole, that he had social connections to a lot of other rich assholes, that he liked sex with underage girls, and that he was eventually caught, went to prison, and probably killed himself there. There are theories that he didn't kill himself, ranging from those that seem superficially plausible (e.g. a sympathetic guard helped provide tools and opportunity for him to commit suicide) and those that seem a lot more implausible (e.g. a wealthy or influential person organised an assassination to prevent him revealing damaging information), but I did not bother looking into it much more than that. Either suicide and what we might call the motte of EDKH could be true, and either way it's inconsequential. The bailey of a large elite conspiracy to kill Epstein before he can reveal something dramatic sounds so much less likely that it would take significantly more for me to update in that direction.
So the questions I would ask you, as presumably an EDKH-believer, are:
What do you think is likely to have happened?
Why is this important?
As far as I can tell from the outside, the EDKH theory is largely circumstantial - here are a bunch of odd things that happened around Epstein's death, it is implausible that these were all just coincidences, here are some other plausible explanations. There doesn't seem to be any truly solid evidence of foul play; just a lot of things that seem suggestive. Is that much correct?
Right now where I am is more or less, "probably he killed himself, there's an outside chance that some sympathetic guard or other staff member helped him kill himself, anything larger than that gets Basic-Argument-Against-Conspiracy-Theories-ed away, and I don't care very much which of the former two theories is true". So, why should I update in the direction of anything more significant, and more importantly, why does it matter? Why should I care about this?
Either he was directly assassinated by the intelligence agencies he was working for, so he won't expose the extent of his operation to the public, or was assisted with his suicide for the same reason.
When you see someone destroying evidence, you should assume that said evidence was important by default. But if you want a theory, it's that his clients likely included many powerful and influential people, who need to be punished.
No shit? What else do you expect when authorities refuse to follow up on leads?
Well, I mean, it seems to me that we have a situation where the official account (unaided suicide) is mostly plausible, there's a minimum-EDKH that's plausible and would be hidden (aided suicide), and then there's a maximum-EDKH that's implausible and is unlikely to be successfully hidden (murder by a third party).
The case for it aided suicide or murder are that circumstances around unaided suicide seem kind of weird to observers. That's not a whole lot to build a case on.
At any rate, my position is that unaided suicide is most likely, aided suicide is reasonably possible, and murder is sufficiently unlikely that we can rule it out; and that the difference between unaided and aided suicide is unimportant.
I don't actually see anyone destroying evidence, though. What's the evidence that's missing?
Yeah, but so what? So is his assassination. It was plausible for Imane Khelif to be female, and it was plausible for him to be male. It was plausible for COVID to have natural origin, and it's pkausible for it to have leaked from a lab... Plenty of cases have more than one scenario, and it's ridiculous to assume that in the presence of multiple plausible scenarios, we should side with the one being out forward by our institutions.
Yes it is, unless you can present stronger evidence. The evidence for his suicide is just as circumstantial.
Jeffrey Epstein.
I don't actually think assassination is plausible. At the very least it is less plausible than one of the other explanations - it requires a lot more moving parts, especially since no particular candidates for either ordering or carrying out the assassination seem to have been identified, or had any evidence pointing towards them.
Nor do I think it's ridiculous to say that, in the presence of multiple plausible scenarios, we should assign higher weight to the official story, if only because it is generally more likely for any given official statement to be true than false. I am not naively claiming that governments never lie about things. I'm saying that things the government says are true are usually either true, or in spitting distance of the truth. They are often massaged a bit, but outright lies are unusual. If nothing else, the government saying that something is true is not evidence that it isn't true. The government may not be always right or always truthful, but its hit rate is better than that of speculating internet randos.
The entire case for EDKH is based on the idea that the official explanation is unsatisfactory. But so far I don't really see a convincing reason to think that the official explanation is that unsatisfactory. The official explanation is pretty plausible. I don't assign 100% probability to it - as I said, I could imagine a minimum-plausible-EDKH being true - but nothing stands out that makes it clearly false. There's no smoking gun that makes me reject it.
Bribing guards to either kill him, let an assassin kill him, or assist him with suicide doesn't strike me as a particularly complex mechanism. At least not any more complex than the series of unlikely events that we are asked to write off as coincidences.
Again, what evidence would you expect to be there when authorities are refusing to follow up on leads?
This is only true if you count things like the daily weather report from the NOAA as "official statements". In cases where lying is in the interest of public institutions they have been found to lie deliberately and frequently, and cases where they opt to tell a truth that is inconvenient for them are insanely infrequent (unless you count declassifications that happen decades after a given fact, I suppose).
This is only true if we grant the official explanation the status of null hypothesis. It's absurd to do so, and you haven't even attempted to justify why we should. EDKH is just as plausible, you haven't given any evidence that would falsify, and are demanding that it's proponents do all the work while you sit back and poke holes in it.
Well, that's why you're not paid to investigate these things. Just consider the probabilities involved. If someone came to your house claiming to be from Mossad or Bill Clinton's people or the Royal Family or whoever and told you that they would totally pay you a lot of money if you committed murder on their behalf, what would you do in response? What would the average person do? What would the average person who has no criminal record and has a job in law enforcement do? If you read enough true crime cases you'll learn that finding a hit man among the general public is incredibly difficult in the best of circumstances because the vast, vast majority of the time the guy you meet in a bar who's short on money and has a checkered past inevitably goes straight to the police.
In this case the murderer wouldn't even have the luxury of picking a vetted assassin from among the general public; he'd be relying on two specific people who are members of the law enforcement community to conduct the hit. People who are specifically screened for not having any criminal record, let alone murder. And you're asking them not only to commit a capital crime but commit it in such a way that will fool the medical examiner and require them to stage the scene. And they would be the only two people with access to the target at the time of the death and be the obvious first suspects in any investigation. And this person is a high-profile inmate whose death will be national news. One of these people is a woman (this detail never seems to get mentioned for some reason). And there are two of them.
And if they do accept your offer and successfully kill Epstein, then what? Given that they've never killed anyone before, there's a good chance that they get prosecuted for his murder. Do you really think that someone under indictment for a capital crime is going to keep his mouth shut for your benefit? What reason could they possibly have to keep quiet?
If you're one of the guards in question and someone offers you money to kill Epstein, why would you even believe that they are who they say they are? How much money would this person have to pay you to take on this kind of risk? At the very least, it is guaranteed that you will lose your job in the aftermath and be virtually unemployable at the same salary you were making, so it would have to be enough money to live in New York for another 50 years, and with a high standard of living, at that. Of course, if either of this guards were living the high life with no discernible source of income, that would raise all kinds of red flags (or at least pique the interest of the IRS), so you'd have to keep this money hidden away so it didn't look like you were living beyond your means, working at whatever menial rent-a-cop job you could get. What would make you think that some rando you met in a bar actually has this kind of money? Of course you're going to demand prepayment. After all, once a man commits murder, breach of contract doesn't seem like such a big deal.
If I'm the guy ordering the hit, how to I get this money to him? Write him a check? How easy do you think it is to transfer that kind of dough without raising any red flags among the banking community? Or maybe you think it would be easier to show up with a suitcase full of cash to a bugged hotel room with Federal agents waiting for you in the parking garage. Or maybe NYPD if he happens to go to them instead. Getting someone to commit murder on your behalf is hard. Getting someone to commit a murder that he will immediately be suspected of is harder. Getting two people to do the same? Damn near impossible.
Consider the probabilities here, just for fun. Let's generously assume that 5% of the extremely law-abiding-background-check-passing population would commit such a murder for the right price. The odds are already 95% that your attempt to off Epstein will end with you in handcuffs. Add in a second person (required here) to be in on the plan and the odds of failure are now 99.75%. Add in a generously high 75% chance that they can actually commit the murder without arousing any suspicion, and you're now down to about 6 hundredths of a percentage point likely to succeed. Even if I use the impossibly optimistic assumption of 50/50 all around, you still wind up in prison 7 out of 8 times. And why are you taking such a huge risk? To prevent the theoretical uncorroborated testimony of a guy who is wholly incredible and has nothing to gain by talking. These conspiracy theories make no fucking sense whatsoever.
Prison guards at least seem to believe that bribery is incredibly widespread in the profession and that it does not, on average, put a very high premium on the lives of sex offenders.
I DON’T disagree that finding two guards willing to personally kill someone is a tall order- probably most prisoners would shrink from doing that. Finding two guards willing to accept money for letting someone- especially a pedophilic pimp- die- either at his own hand, or someone else’s- seems like… Tuesday.
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Based on my experiences dealing with prisons & jails:
Bribing a prison guard doesn't take that much money. In my state, quite a few are caught every year smuggling drugs into facilities for paltry amounts of money, and certainly paltry amounts when compared to the pension/benefits they're losing for the rest of their life.
Bribery isn't the only avenue. Intimidation also works. "Oh hey, you have family at [address]. Nice family. How about you take a nap on date/time and make sure you're away from cell block X."
The guards can be in on it to some extent, and they're generally no bigger fan of accused child molesters than the general public. Plus getting other inmates to commit murder isn't impossible. In one facility I'm aware of, several accused child molesters kept ending up as cellmates to a particular accused murderer (who had been molested as a child). Those accused child molesters kept having unfortunate fatal accidents while a large group of other inmates were willing to swear the accused murderer was in the showers, at recreation, etc. The placement of those victims as his cellmates and him being informed of their charges was under the control of the guards.
So someone planning something nefarious doesn't necessarily need a well-paid, skilled hitman. They need to bribe or coerce guards into looking the other way for a few minutes (or just tell them that the guy in the cell is a child molester and he's going to get taken care of). They need an inmate who might have a grudge against child molesters and be willing to commit murder (not hard to find in most jails and prisons--guys have been beaten to death for the wrong rumor that they were a child molester). They need to get that inmate into the cell for a few minutes.
Did that happen to Epstein? I don't know. But it wouldn't require that many moving parts. I think intentionally giving him the opportunity to off himself while he was supposed to be closely watched is more likely, but most prisons & jails are incredibly shoddily-run and capable of being manipulated.
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Those are a lot of good questions. Unfortunately we don’t know the answers to them because the guards all fell asleep and the investigators forgot to ask. :^)
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I admittedly don't know the logistics of killing a man, but enough people get killed by accident in stupid brawls that I have to ask - come on how hard is it to strange someone and wrap some cloth around him afterwards. Are you going to say that it would leave evidence of murder? The evidence was literally already examined by a pathologist claiming it's more indicative of murder, and summarily ignored. Your assumption that any indication of foul play would trigger a proper investigation is completely unfounded.
Yes, I absolutely 100% believe that, and I would like to know what empirical evidence is your belief that this is in any way unlikely based on. From child castration fetishists joining professional medical associations in order to normalize their fetish, to the Community Relations Service twisting people's arms to say that the murder of their children is not about race, I've seen enough brazen conspiracies that have only come out by accident, that the rationalist default idea of "someone would have squealed" looks patently absurd.
Or take something that you might find less controversial: do you think Prigozhin's airplane just so happened to suffer a completely innocent accident? Or do you think these kind of assassinations only happen in countries like Russia? I think both are absurd, but the latter is the more absurd of the two.
You really think that the CIA or the Mossad would have any trouble delivering someone a suitcase full of cash? You think either of them would be questioned by the banking community, of all people?
Step me through why the FBI or NYPD would dare to get in the way of intelligence services. And before you get to that, tell me how would they evem know there's anything to get ij the way of.
I did, it does not come out the way you want.
Keep in mind that the official explanation is that the prison was an absolute clownshow where the cameras were falling apart so frequently that both of the ones aimed at Epstein's cell just so happened to be not working, and both of the guards on duty fell asleep at the same time. Let's generously assume that 95% of guards like that would refuse a suitcase full of money to strangle a pedophile with guaranteed impunity, how many of them do you think would refuse a suitcase full of money for "hey, why don't you lend me your keycard and uniform, and take a day off"?
Your entire argument works on the assumption that the American system would immediately trigger an alarm if any irregularity was found. That assumption is not backed by anything in this reality.
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